Gypsy - Lesley Pearse [193]
‘Have you lost it all?’ Jack asked as he helped the old man to his cabin.
‘Yeah, I reckon so,’ Oz said before collapsing on to his bed and immediately falling into a dead sleep.
Jack went down to Oz’s cabin twice during the evening to check he was all right, but he didn’t wake.
‘He’ll have gambled the claim away,’ Jack said sadly as he returned to Beth. ‘He’s brought nothing back with him but a couple of bottles of whisky. No provisions or anything. I guess we’ll have to brace ourselves for moving on quicker than we expected.’
‘That’s fine,’ Beth said. ‘Let’s get a boat back to Vancouver. I can play in the Globe again, you’ll get work easily enough. I’ve got the money I saved, that will see us through.’
‘Would you like to go home?’ Jack asked.
‘To England?’ she asked.
Jack nodded.
‘I don’t think of it as home any more,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘There wouldn’t be anything there for me.’
‘That’s how I see it too,’ Jack agreed. ‘Home is wherever you are. I guess we’ve got to find the place where we feel we both belong.’
That night their lovemaking had a tinge of sadness because it was the end of an era for them. For weeks they’d enjoyed the kind of total privacy that they knew they’d never get anywhere else, and freedom to do exactly as they pleased. They’d even put the tin bath outside and bathed in the sunshine in the happy knowledge no one could hear or see them. Back in any city they could only expect to find a couple of rooms, with all the noise, smells and disagreements that accompanied crowded conditions.
The following morning Beth made a pile of pancakes and took them down to Oz; Jack followed on with a pot of coffee. But to their surprise he was sitting on the bench outside his cabin in clean clothes, his beard shaved off and his hair soaking wet.
Beth had always imagined he was at least sixty, but with the beard gone she could see he was twenty years younger.
‘Well,’ she said, placing the plate of pancakes down on the bench beside him and putting her hands on her hips. ‘We expected to find you still sleeping it off. Or are you the younger brother of the Ostrich?’
His smile was a faintly embarrassed one. ‘I had a dip in the creek,’ he said. ‘I guess it was the shock of the cold water that made me shave off the beard. I sure am sorry I left you to look after Silver and Flash so long, but things got sort of complicated.’
‘Eat your pancakes while they’re hot,’ Jack said, and poured coffee for them all. ‘So when have we all got to leave here?’
‘Olsen will be out later today,’ Oz said.
Jack nodded. Olsen the Swede had already made a fortune from his mine on the Eldorado and owned a lot of property in Dawson. A formidable giant of a man and a first-class poker player, he’d probably targeted Oz the moment he heard he was in town with gold.
‘It ain’t the same in Dawson any more,’ Oz said sadly. ‘Sure, they’ve spruced it up, but there’s a kinda gloom about the place, like the bubble’s burst. And there’s ladies arriving now!’
‘Well, that’s good, isn’t it?’ Beth said, sitting down on a tree stump. ‘There never were enough to go round.’
‘They ain’t good-time girls.’ Oz shook his head as if that grieved him. ‘They’s real ladies, bankers’ wives, society dames, school marms and such with their parasols and fancy hats. Come to settle with their husbands and children too. There’s a fancy dress shop now, some Frenchy dame owns it, they reckons you can get the latest Paris fashions there.’
Beth and Jack looked at each other, wondering if this was true or just Oz imagining it. ‘How’s the Monte Carlo?’ Beth asked.
‘All painted up again like there never was a fire. Fallon’s long gone. They said he high-tailed out of town soon after you left there.’
‘What about One Eye?’ Jack asked.
‘He’s still there. They reckon he’s got a saloon over in Louse Town and runs a few whores there.’
‘So where are you going today then?’ Jack asked.
‘That depends.’
‘On how much you can scrape together here?’ Jack asked. ‘It’s lucky I kept on panning for you while you were gone.’ He reached into